REAGAN: Yes, we have lived in such a time. In many areas of the country in the old days, prostitution operated with local control and there was no problem and they even claimed inspection and so forth. Once, at the beginning of World War II, I asked the medical officer at our post (it was in New Orleans) why they were closing up the brothels with so many military bases there. And he gave me a pretty hard, cold answer. He said the army isn’t interested in morals. The army’s interested in keeping soldiers healthy. He showed me the difference in the statistics. He said the average girl in a house handled roughly 40 to 50 customers a night. And he said if you give her a five day week, that’s 200 to 250. Suppose the first man infects her and here are 200 to 249 men that follow suit during that week and he said the most often that you could possibly inspect would be once a week. He said we also know statistically that by putting a girl out on a street because of the difficulty of soliciting and getting to a place and getting back out on the street again, they only handle about 9 customers. Now, he said, the first thing that’s done when they’re picked up is inspection. So every 10 days she averages inspection –and there’s only been 90 customers in between. Now, you stop to think of the public health situation of this. You have to, then, take on certain regulatory chores if you’re going to have this.
REASON: Back to taxes, you’ve been very critical of the People’s Lobby and the League of Women Voters’ drive to change the Constitution to do away with the 2/3 majority requirement for raising bank taxes . . .
REAGAN: If they’re really a People’s Lobby, why aren’t they going to do what we tried to do and were opposed all the time that I was governor. Don’t change that part of the law–change the other part of the law that says the rest of us can be taxed by a simple majority. If they really want to put a referendum on the ballot, why don’t they go out and say to the people, do you want to change this and make it so that a simple majority can increase that tax or do you want to make it that it requires a two-thirds majority of the legislature to change any tax?
REASON: You’re sounding like a libertarian, now, Governor. We’d like to go all the way to 100 percent requirement for taxes!
REAGAN: Well, I don’t know if that would work or not ... but I think that this other one will. Look–you’ve got a legislature that takes two-thirds to pass the budget, it takes two-thirds to pass an appropriation bill, a spending bill–so why shouldn’t it take a two-thirds majority to say whether you’re going to raise the taxes. But these are fools who are circulating this petition, and again the League of Women Voters have explained that they are against any effort on the part of government to restrict government’s ability to meet the needs and so forth. In other words to spend your money.
But they are fools in thinking that business somehow is getting a special break. Who pays the business tax anyway? We do! You can’t tax business. Business doesn’t pay taxes. It collects taxes. And if they can’t be passed on to the customer in the price of the product as a cost of operation, business goes out of business. Now what they’re going to do is make it easier for demagogic politicians–and you’ve got plenty of them in the state legislature–to say to the people, look, we need money for this worthwhile project but we’re not going to tax you, we’re going to tax business, now that we can do it by a one vote margin. So they’ll tax business and the price of the product will go up and the people will blame the storekeeper for the rise in the price of the product, not recognizing that all he’s doing is passing on to them a hidden sales tax.
If people need any more concrete explanation of this, start with the staff of life, a loaf of bread. The simplest thing; the poorest man must have it. Well, there are 151 taxes now in the price of a loaf of bread–it accounts for more than half the cost of a loaf of bread. It begins with the first tax, on the farmer that raised the wheat. Any simpleton can understand that if that farmer cannot get enough money for his wheat, to pay the property tax on his farm, he can’t be a farmer. He loses his farm. And so it is with the fellow who pays a driver’s license and a gasoline tax to drive the truckload of wheat to the mill, the miller who has to pay everything from social security tax, business license, everything else. He has to make his living over and above those costs. So they all wind up in that loaf of bread. Now an egg isn’t far behind and nobody had to make that. There’s a hundred taxes in an egg by the time it gets to market and you know the chicken didn’t put them there!
REASON: Governor, how did you develop your philosophy of individualism?
REAGAN: Oh, Lord! I suppose I did it myself and I did it by way of the mashed potato circuit. I started out in life as a New Deal Democrat, and I campaigned many times for that. In later years–you know if you don’t sing or dance and you’re in show business as I was, you find that you either wind up as the toastmaster or the after-dinner speaker–there were two or three of us in the business who were used quite widely: the industry would always call on us to represent show business someplace where speaking was to be done. But if you make a speech about Hollywood, for example, and the sorrows and problems of the motion picture industry, you’ve got to tie it into the people you’re talking to and why they should be interested. I used to use the very obvious comparison that if one industry could be discriminated against taxwise and otherwise as ours had been–threats of censorship and all–then how
Long could it be before this happened to their industry. Pretty soon businessmen were coming to me and saying, " Let me tell you what’s already happening to our industry!"
Finally after years of this I came back home once from a speaking trip and said to Nancy, "Look, you know it’s just occurred to me that I go out and make all these speeches of things that I’m against and then I go out and campaign for the Democrats who are making it happen. I’m going to stop." Now it took me a while to get around to reregistering. But I started campaigning even though I was still a Democrat, for people on the other side; and then finally I didn’t want to become one of those professional Democrats who goes all his life saying he’s never voted for a Democrat, so I reregistered.
REASON: You said you were speaking out against censorship at that time?
REAGAN: Oh yes, yes.
REASON: Are you still against censorship?
REAGAN: Yes. I believed in the voluntary motion picture code. I think the motion picture industry is destroying itself and I think it is displaying bad taste in its lousy theatre.
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|10.25.09 @ 11:01PM|#
I like Reagan, but I wonder sometimes how different and how better the world might be had he read Atlas Shrugged. Oh if only!
|11.2.09 @ 7:11PM|#
I have a feeling he did. Google Reagan and "Red Hen" - he had his own mini-fable version of Atlas Shrugged that he told many times.
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|2.6.11 @ 2:51PM|#
Remember kids, all right thinking people in the 1970s thought Reagan was stupid. Just a senile old man and a dumb actor. People said as bad or worse things about Reagan than they say today about Sarah Palin. He was absolutely demonized.
You read that interview and you may not agree with everything. But it is remarkable how smart the guy was and how well thoughtout his views were. And moreover how much higher of a level he spoke at than politicians of today. Can you imagine Nancy Pelosi or McCAin or our alledged Willie Coyote super genius in the Whitehouse giving an interview that plain spoken and well thought out? I can't.
|2.6.11 @ 5:39PM|#
I was just thinking along these precise lines while reading this.
While I'm not a huge Reagan fan, there is simply no comparison between him and Sarah Palin. It's laughable to consider her giving an off-the-cuff interview half this intelligent, knowledgeable, and clear.
Yeah, a formidable individual whatever your opinion of his politics or policies.
DDavis|2.7.11 @ 5:42PM|#
That's what occurred to me too.
Seeing Reagan refer to the views of Lenin was an eye opener. Seeing the references to Von Mises and Hayek and Bastiat were less surprising in terms of content, but a little surprising in terms of intellectualism.
I had always considered Reagan smart, but thought that he had just worked out a decent political philosophy on his own over a period of years.
Dickhead|2.7.11 @ 8:27PM|#
I know all are too lazy to question what doesn't agree with us. But what of the Spanish American War? Did you know a powerful politician overruled an army leader (who wanted to just kill local animals for protein as armies had always done) to direct business to hometown Chicago meat companies? So did the free market cause that problem or large government cronyism? I always ask persons who think the government FDA protects us (actually it protects the producers) why would a private company, that has no leverage but the quality of its product, intentionally harm its customers? In a real free market, a company harming its customers no longer has customers. Instead the FDA promotes shoddy quality.
|10.26.11 @ 11:22AM|#
We have a core problem in United States the Withholding /Compliance / Lobbying System as it effectively runs our country. A repeal of the 16th must happen and the Fair Tax Act is a painless way of doing that.
Glenn